NAVAJO COUNTRY
Trip Start
Jul 31, 2010
1
18
26
Trip End
Oct 29, 2010
Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park, Arizona
Saturday, September 5, 2009
YA’ ‘AT ‘EEH Everyone,
The Anazasi people, who now prefer to be known as the Ancestral Puebloans, are the inheritors of some fairly impressive history…. and the first place I visited was Mesa Verde Nat Park in the south western corner of Colorado.
Now I assumed this area would be just a pueblo on the top of a mesa…. Geez… how wrong can you be? First of all, it wasn’t just any old mesa… this took me forever to climb in the struggling V6... but.. Man!.. was it something…
Coming from Oz where real history is the Rocks area of Sydney… seeing cliff dwellings in places we’d previously only seen the likes of eagles… was mind-boggling… simply getting to these dwellings required scrambling up wooden ladders, thru tiny passages, and the exchange of a number of greenbacks.
But, hey!! I’m not that tight-assed…. and this was worth the small outlay…
These dwellings were ABANDONED 900 years ago…
These people lived in such a harsh environment… drought and snow… they were really stretched to the limits… they grew corn, beans and squash on the tops of the mesas, building check dams to hold rainwater and snowmelt.
They took advantage of the sheltered alcoves in the cliffs to build their dwellings in some of the most precipitous locations… using chinks in the rock face for footholds to access the recesses. Construction was mostly of finely crafted stone, with sharp corners or curved walls.. all this material having been hauled up from the canyon floor.
To maintain an even temperature in their dwellings they built kivas, sunken round rooms with a vented central fireplace and a single entrance via a ladder thru the chimney in the roof, which was at ground level.. The room had a constant temperature of about 55 degrees, so was perfect for summer and winter.
The ingenuity of these people was impressive. They were great potters and basket weavers too, and still today they produce great artifacts, but the prices are prohibitive. Anyway, they abandoned these dwellings for unknown reasons and they weren’t discovered until the late 1800’s.
Just check out the photos on the web album if you haven’t been there and seen it for yourself…. it’ll blow you away…
Fully charged with historic vibes coursing thru the blood stream, I headed for the Trail of the Ancients…. their words, not mine… and found myself in this out-of-the-way place called Hovenweep, another Navajo ancient village, but built in a completely different style because of the terrain. They opted for towers on the tops of the mesas… what’s amazing in both locations is the precipitous locations for the expansive puebloan communities they built.
After an hour or so at the wheel, I found myself in the tiny village of Bluff, an outpost of the Mormons over a hundred years ago, and I spent some time moseying around Fort Bluff… the original location for the settlement…. ostensibly to convert the Indians to Christianity… and proving themselves such stalwarts when it came to pioneering.
From Bluff I tortured the suspension across some fairly tough tracks along the Valley Of the Gods… and while I thought it was impressive, the pots and pans flew outta the cupboards and bounced across the floor in such a cocophany of noise, I decided to do the inevitable U-turn, and head back to the blacktop. Goosenecks was the next stop, an incredible switchback of the Colorado River as it snaked for 8 miles in a continual S bend that progressed only 2 mile in actual distance… and the landscape was amazingly dismal… I mean, not a single blade of grass…
But Monument Valley was calling… I could see it in the distance… must’ve been 30 miles away…. the magnificent shapes were familiar and I was on a mission. …. unbelievably beautiful country, chiselled mesas rising from crimson flats, towering buttes and massive mesas…. I wanted to get some of that red dust beneath my boots, traipse surreal terrain under the azure sky… but it wasn’t gonna happen!
Now, I’m a fairly liberal person ( what a crock of shit), and could’ve been known as a capitalist if only I’d had the inclination…. but I don’t like being dragged around by the short and curlies…. and the natives sure think they have their hands full of your fibre… ‘cos they know how to fleece you good and proper.
Let me explain,.. I’m sure you’re hanging on the edge of your seat… they have this reservation ( that’s a noun not a verb).. and they want your money to take a look at it…. not a nominal fee you understand… but a giant rip-off because they know that tourists will pay any price you name. Well…. most tourists…. not this little black duck…. So I decided to take my own top-heavy RV down the valley along the corrugated dirt track instead of forking out $70 for a half day native-escorted tour deep into the gullies and gulches. Needless to say I only made it a mile before the pots and pans had shaken themselves out of the cupboards and were dancing across the floor, and on top of that, I’m sure it was shaking up my beer in the fridge. So incredibly I decided to call it quits, poured myself a lovely long scotch and coke ( in an inconspicuous vessel, ‘cos alcohol isn’t permitted on ancestral grounds) and deposited myself most comfortably in my chair in the optimum viewing site and awaited sunset and all its glories to be reflected upon the monoliths so displayed before me…. I was in my element… I was a happy girl.
Retreating to my fridge on wheels to refresh my glass, a tourist jeep drew up alongside me… after the billowing bulldust subsided I counted a dozen hapless punters in the back of one of these open-air tourists jeeps, choking on dust and gasping for refreshment…. and I asked “ So how much fun is that, then?”… I got only one reply but it was not convincing… so I knew I’d made the right decision and refused to succumb to the “got to see it all” syndrome. Meanwhile, the Navajo driver sits in his air-conditioned cabin, and he tried to convince me that when moving there was no dust… ha!
The classic panoramas we’ve all seen in the movies and the promos for the area are readily visible for bugger all anyway… and from the comfort of your bar stool on the verandah of the brand-spanking new hotel they’ve plonked in the prime viewing spot…. Well now… fancy that!!!
Being the romantic, I’d had visions of camping out under the vast blanket of a million blazing stars in the glorious red desert… but that’s not possible now… they have such regulations on where you can camp… I’m sure there was a regulation on farting too but I can’t remember the finer details.
At one glorious location I saw a number of Turkey Buzzards, huge birds that’d flattened the crest of the pine trees…. And then there was the Jack Rabbit that I nearly flattened myself… I thought it was a duiker when it first darted out in front of me.
The magic countryside continued as I rolled into Page, a town established in the 1950’s when construction started on the Glen Canyon Dam… creating the most magnificent Lake Powell with a dramatic backdrop of blood-red rock, offering stunning vistas …. How I would’ve loved to have my sea kayak with me…
plenty of inviting sandy beaches to camp on and oodles of canyons and idyllic hidden wonders to explore on the most impressive stretch of water in this surreal desert oasis.
The big drawcard in Page seemed to be Antelope Canyon, an area of petrified sand dune that’d been known and visited by locals for yonks, but now the natives conduct guided tours for the princely sum of $32 for an hour… the place is overrun by busloads of snap-happy folks who obviously think this is a bargain…. well, it sorted the men from the boys… and I was definitely a downtrodden adolescent…even with the great exchange rate now, it was still close to $40AU, so I opted out.
Spent an entertaining evening parked outside the Gunsmoke Saloon, watching the comings and goings of bikers and cowboys. Next morning it was off to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.
HA’ GOO’ NEE’
(I think that’s farewell in Navajo)
